A little background....I run the statistical department for a smallish investment manager. My primary responsibilities are performance reporting, risk analysis, and quantitative equity screening. I'm starting to reach the limits of Excel and frankly my job will become obsolete in the next decade or less so I have a sense of urgency to learn the PC languages that will ultimately replace me so I can maintain some relevance and/or use my newly found coding knowledge to start consulting firms into the future.

With that said, it's looking like Python has started to become a mainstay in the investment field. Anybody know Python, if so, what's the best way to start learning?

I use python often for scripting purposes in continuous deployment (CD) pipelines. I also use it for writing various utilities that I build as docker containers so other members of my devops team can easily use them by just running the container. python is great for newbies that do not have experience with other coding languages because readability was emphasized by the creators of the language. Code blocks are delimited by indenting which makes it very clean to look at. But it all makes the syntax kind of unforgiving because in python the whitespace matters which leads to the common error... "IndentationError: expected an indented block". With most programming/scripting languages whitespace doesn't matter at all. I'm assuming certain modules would be very useful in the financial industry and my hunch is the SciPy module is one of them. There are lots of good beginner python tutorials on the web. Once you get the basics down if I were you I'd look at the scipy cookbooks http://scipy-cookbook.readthedocs.io/

You also might want to look at R. R is a very popular programming language for statistical work. Sports analytics use R quite a bit. If you want a little introduction to R that is both practical and interesting Boston U periodically does a free (the course completion certification has a nominal fee) online sabermetrics course that does an intro to R and SQL. https://www.edx.org/course/sabermetrics ... sabr101x-0

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What you'll learnThe basics of data science, and how it applies to the study of baseballFundamentals of R and SQL programming languagesHow to compute and communicate statistical analysis of baseball dataThe history of baseball analytics and sabermetrics as a field of inquiry

I have no idea if the course is good or bad... I've not taken it.

_________________Neal Huntington on what he's been told by his bosses about $$$: "We've got assurances we're going to be able to continue to do what we've done."

I am from the same background as LLS. I have developed many large to medium sized systems.

Python has some serious long term problems. it is a good language to learn how to program but not one I would write an enterprise level tool in. Especially one that had to be maintained by other people. You can do fine with Javascript if you use something like Node.js as a framework. I prefer languages like C# or Java to do the background work.

_________________To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.- Henri Poincaré

I am from the same background as LLS. I have developed many large to medium sized systems.

Python has some serious long term problems. it is a good language to learn how to program but not one I would write an enterprise level tool in. Especially one that had to be maintained by other people. You can do fine with Javascript if you use something like Node.js as a framework. I prefer languages like C# or Java to do the background work.

I agree Python is better suited as a scripting language for sys admin type functionality than application development in traditional client/server architecture. However that is shifting a bit with serverless architectures. Python is a good choice for serverless function calls. Python is popular with developers using AWS Lambda.

_________________Neal Huntington on what he's been told by his bosses about $$$: "We've got assurances we're going to be able to continue to do what we've done."